Mary Renault, “The Friendly Young Ladies”

I grew up reading Mary Renault’s gripping historical novels about ancient Greece, especially the two Theseus novels, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. So I was surprised when, at the library, I found a Mary Renault novel titled The Friendly Young Ladies with cover art from the 1930s and a copyright date of 1944. I even wondered if it was the same Mary Renault — and the only literary evidence that it is resides in general narrative fluency and a concern with homosexuality.

According to this edition’s afterword, Renault herself was gay, and spent much of her life in a relationship with another woman. And evidently The Friendly Young Ladies reflects Renault’s coming to grips with her sexual orientation and how it played out in her life as a young woman. The “young ladies” of the title are the beautiful self-possessed blonde Helen, the boyish Leonora, and Leo’s young sister Elsie. They are characterized as “friendly” by a young man who tries his hand at romancing all of them, serially.

Leo & Helen live in an old college barge converted to a houseboat. Sweet!

I was less interested in Leo and Helen’s relationship, which has an admirable functional stability, than in the character of the willfully naive Elsie. The novel opens with her as the miserable pawn in her parents’ toxic marriage. When a young doctor, Peter Bracknell, takes it upon himself to bring some sparkle to Elsie’s life, she falls for him with the ardor of the terribly bored. In fact a case could be made that Elsie is one of those girls whose life is ruined by trashy reading — the use of fiction to distract, pacify, entertain or inspire, is an important theme in this novel. Inspired by Peter, Elsie runs away to find Leonora, who lives with Helen on a houseboat not far from London. Soooo picturesque, and Renault makes the most of her atmospheric setting. It’s Peter, of course, who has a go at Helen and Leo, eliciting temperate but courteous responses. The final character to add to this merry-go-round is the enigmatic neighbor Joe, a writer like Leo. Joe is the real deal, manly, sincere, unpretentious but a literary heavyweight. He and Leo are the closest of friends, cooperative and easy together until sex upsets the apple cart.

At this point, the rhetoric gets awfully heated and I was reminded of Dorothy Sayers’ novels, in which sleeping with a man has earth-shaking emotional significance. Morning-after chat:

‘Leo.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know, don’t you, this can’t end here.’

‘My dear,’ she said. ‘it’s tomorrow now. It has ended.’

‘We said that. But not now.’

‘Now more than ever. You know that’s true.’

‘It would tear up our lives,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve thought of all that. But it might be worth it.’

‘It might be. But it never is.’”

Well, times have changed, haven’t they? But the character of Elsie, who goes through the book evading unpleasantness and refusing to acknowledge reality, is someone we still meet. She assumes that once Peter has kissed her on the forehead, they are engaged. She casts herself as the heroine of any drama, and gooses up daily life until its turbulence satisfies her. Reading a few pages of one of Joe’s books, “Elsie would have known what to say about a book like this if it had come out of the library in the ordinary way. There was enough suffering and sordidness in real life; a good book should make one happy.”

Ironically The Friendly Young Ladies probably wouldn’t have satisfied Elsie’s craving for romance or Joe’s urge toward unadorned modernism. But sometimes an author writes a book to figure out what she thinks, and the result can offer its own unusual pleasures.

Susan Hill, “The Vows of Silence”

I hate when I do this, but I bet you’ve done it, too. You’re on vacation, in an unfamiliar book store. You see a book by a favorite writer but gosh! can’t remember if you’ve read it or not. You buy it, hoping, and spend the first 20 pages wondering if it really is familiar…. or if you just think it is. Then you get to a key scene and it all becomes clear — yes. Now you own two copies of the same book.

Fortunately if the writer is Susan Hill and the book is The Vows of Silence  and, like me, you first read it several years ago, it’s still sufficiently complex to be interesting. Hill’s mysteries are fairly straightforward police procedurals set in a cathedral town, with the startling difference that Hill sometimes subverts the genre. Cops get killed: mysteries don’t get solved. Simon Serrailler is her very compelling detective, a moody, handsome bachelor who is also a highly respected artist. Serrailler may embody overt homage to some of the classic British detectives like P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh (sensitive widowed poet) and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey (blond, charming, complicated attitude toward women). But Serrailler also has a rich family life which, in The Vows of Silence, brings him as much pain as comfort.

The mystery involves a lone gunman who is killing young women in the cathedral town of Lafferton. Hill adroitly slips in and out of the consciousness of the killer, the victims, Serrailler, his sister, peripheral characters. To some extent this installment in the series suffers from the weaknesses of the genre: characters familiar from earlier books appear almost gratuitously. But there’s a rigorous intelligence behind the writing. Hill is never sentimental, she doesn’t let Simon off the hook (he can be a real jerk about his father, for instance) and she doesn’t solve her narrative difficulties by taking the lazy way out. I’m a little bit baffled as to why she isn’t better known in the U.S. and why I can’t buy her books for my Kindle. I’ve already given away my extra copy of The Vows of Silence, though.

Elizabeth George, “This Body of Death”

Sometimes I wonder if the classic police-procedural style murder mystery has a future. The form has endured since, oh, let’s say the 1930s, bringing a lot of pleasure and diversion to millions of readers. Times change, and the puzzle-format mysteries of an Agatha Christie may not continue to please readers who are accustomed to more moral complexity and, arguably, more naturalism in their escape fiction. I say “arguably” because this is a highly artificial art form. As we know, the mystery begins with a disruption of order and ends with order restored. The problem is that restoration of order can seem contrived. What’s more, the pleasures of the serial involve a cast of recurring characters, but it can be difficult for a writer to work them all into a satisfying plot. Worse, if a series is successful its protagonists have to endure a freakish range of outlandish incidents in a compressed time-frame. The reader’s suspension of disbelief helps with many of these issues but the creators of this genre walk a fine line. The plot has to be plausible enough, but original; time must be spent on setting and mood; new characters must be believable and, if possible, major returning characters should be allowed to develop further. There are just a lot of balls to keep in the air.

And Elizabeth George juggles them like the pro she is. This Body of Death (not a great title, I’ll admit) takes up Thomas Lynley’s return to New Scotland Yard after the random murder of his wife. I’ve always thought George started writing this series as an updated look at Dorothy Sayers‘ Lord Peter Wimsey, and I found all the breathless aristocracy stuff very hard to take. But somewhere along the way Lynley burst out of his Jermyn Street tailoring and became almost flesh and blood, if a little too good to be true. I’m convinced George killed off his wife Helen because she was a walking cliché (titled airhead with a heart of gold). Now, widowed, Lynley is far more interesting.

For instance, in this book he can maybe get involved with Acting Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, his hard-drinking temporary boss. Maybe his close but complicated relationship with his snarky partner Barbara Havers will have to reach some clarity. And of course, he will probably be instrumental in solving this murder because he is so empathetic and such a good listener. It’s a good plot, too, very complex, involving a really inventive twist that George sets up from the get-go though you don’t necessarily see it as that. Briefly, a girl is murdered in a cemetery, a suspect is found, but a loose end in the investigation actually turns out to lead to the murderer. All very satisfying, right down to the statutory face-off between the good guys and the bad guys. There’s even a little tiny flicker of hope at the end for two subsidiary characters who ended up as collateral damage. My only complaint was a little too much local-color information on thatching (yes, as in those cute roofs), but I see that as a small price to pay for renewed optimism about the future of one of my favorite forms of entertainment.

Edmund Crispin, “The Case of the Gilded Fly”

Stop the presses for a startling literary discovery — the first inklings of meta-fiction in a Golden Age English murder mystery! Yes indeed: in the early pages of The Case of the Gilded Fly professor/detective Gervase Fen says “In fact I’m the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction.” A bit further on, Fen and the Chief Constable of Oxford spar over the details of the murder and their importance. Fen says, “That’s all very well in a detective novel, where it has to be put in to camouflage the significant things…” and Sir Richard expresses his annoyance at “the sort of detective story in which one of the characters propounds view on how detective stories should be written.”  Huh? Did writers really have this acute level of self-consciousness in 1944?

Apparently Crispin did. He was actually musician Bruce Montgomery, a composer and one-time organist at St. John’s College, Oxford, which accounts for sentences like one where he refers to “just that touch of preciosity, the lengthening, shortening, or corruption of vowels which is the prerogative of a good choir.” (A familiar concept to this choral singer.) And he wrote with a level of playful archness that makes his mysteries a cross between Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. Crispin specialized in following the form of the classic murder mystery while embroidering madly to create a baroque and very funny hybrid. The Case of the Gilded Fly, for instance, is a classic locked-room drama but it also contains the familiar trope of the dramatic performance; the victim of the first murder is the slutty actress everyone in the company loathes. And while Christie or Sayers gave us more or less human detectives, Gervase Fen is something like Sherlock Holmes on Ritalin: variously acutely observant, wildly eccentric, and as distractible as a six-year-old.

None of the characters in this novel approaches three dimensions, but you don’t really mind because the writing is so diverting in that baroque style that harks back to the Dickens, piling phrase on phrase, image on image. (Note to self: at a later point, explore further the Golden Age detective novel as a 19th-century survival.) For instance, Crispin writes a long paragraph on the beginning of the Oxford term: “Notices concerning club activities, many offensively designed, began to appear in college lodges; … a week or so later, more luggage would arrive, under the system ironically described by the railway companies as luggage in advance; tutors heaved regretful sighs, freshmen arrived in a state of crescent bewilderment and anguished self-consciousness, and college cooks meditated enormities.” (Love the use of “crescent” in its archaic sense.)

I had read previous Crispin novels but not this one, which is put out by an outfit called “Felony & Mayhem.” They usefully reissue  a series of the older mysteries under their “Vintage” imprint. Notwithstanding their apparent honesty I remained skeptical about Crispin’s dates (this could have been some kind of ironic recycling, I thought) until I got to several parallel love scenes, in all of which the couples merely kissed, and agreed to get married.

Deborah Crombie, “Where Memories Lie”

What does it mean for the classic English procedural mystery that two of the best practitioners of the genre are American? Elizabeth George is from Huntington Beach, California and Deborah Crombie is from Texas. This makes me imagine them as longing desperately for some mist, some humidity, some lack of definition, some ambiguity — aha! England! I haven’t been to Texas but the searing flat light and surf culture of Huntington Beach are the anti-England. London is the perfect antidote.

Crombie does her research and she has a good ear — good enough to fool me, anyway. (They call it “drink-driving” in the UK: who knew?) And in contrast to the P.D. James I just finished, Where Memories Lie satisfied my appetite for character study as well providing a soundly plotted mystery. Here we get a tale involving the wartime past of Gemma’s friend Erika Rosenthal.  We also get Gemma’s mother’s illness and resulting family squabbles.  All very satisfying.

But I do start to worry about Gemma’s family and friends. The last book involved her parter Duncan Kincaid’s sister. Two back, her friend and former landlady Hazel got dragged into a murder plot. Of course this is one of the implications of a long-running mystery series. We as readers are looking for a story that is, to a certain extent, naturalistic. We want clear, literate, un-showy prose, believable characters, practically credible mysteries. Yet the genre is also remarkably artificial. Writing effective murder mysteries must be like designing tennis dresses: your parameters are very clearly defined and if you stray beyond them, you have failed. Your item (dress, book) loses its functionality. Or becomes unrecognizable.

It’s very much to Crombie’s credit that she has cranked out 12 of these books and that they continue to improve, to get more imaginative, more thoughtful, more complex. And it must be very daunting to finish book 12 and then cast your eye around your fictional landscape, looking for the next place to plant a dead body. I think the whisper of discontent I’m feeling here is caused by another unspoken convention of the genre: your detectives can — indeed, must — have these spectacularly eventful careers, one cleared case after another. (A convention, by the way, challenged by British  newcomer Susan Hill.) But maybe the ancillary characters should be left alone, to provide a respite for the protagonist? Or … no, I think this is it. By involving Gemma’s and Duncan’s  friends and families in the plots, Crombie points a little bit too emphatically to the artifice she works within. I know the great  Sayers did this first, but her books never aspired to anything beyond artifice. Gemma James washes dishes and worries about her children and gets nervous giving a dinner party. This situates her much closer to real life than was ever true for Harriet Vane. So Crombie’s utilization of the friends-and-family as central to the mystery plots is faintly jarring, it just pushes a little too hard against the verisimilitude in which her books are situated.

Dorothy Sayers, “Clouds of Witness”

Not much to this one, which is the item in the series when Lord Peter’s brother gets accused of murder at a shooting lodge in Yorkshire.  When I picked it up I couldn’t remember much about it and now I know why. Very traditional detecting of the 1920s sort. The most striking thing is a passage — not directly related to the mystery — about a man who “said no pleasure ever came up to the anticipation, and so he lived like a hermit — doing nothing but planning all the things he might have done. He wrote an elaborate diary, containing, day by day, the record of this visionary existence which he had never dared put to the test of actuality.” Very metaphysical, for a murder mystery, but not surprising as coming from Sayers.

Dorothy Sayers, “Whose Body?”

I went to Columbia to watch the Inauguration.  They had a Jumbotron below the steps of Low Library and as we all stood there in the brilliant snowy cold listening to Obama’s speech, the bells at Riverside Church began to peal. It was amazingly moving.

It also got me thinking about campanology, a word no one would know without Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. I haven’t read it in a long time though it was the first Sayers I made my way through. I got a hankering to revisit it, but when I went to the shelf yesterday my pedantry got the better of me and I decided instead to start from the beginning, i.e. Whose Body, in which Lord Peter Wimsey makes his appearance.

Goodness: more shell shock. Between Siegfried Sassoon and Pat Barker you’d think I’d had enough of this. Mercifully Sayers confines herself to a mere flashback episode (clearly Lord Peter suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome) but in a page and a half she redeems him from being an insufferable twit. In my eyes, anyway. But then, he’s my first love and as such beyond any substantive criticism.

It’s been many years since I read this one. It’s thin; more a matter of clever clockwork than interests me normally. Characters mere adumbrations of what they’ll become in later books. But very clever in places. At one point a walk-on character (Sayers at this point is writing in second person, a feat you rarely see in early twentieth-century detective fiction) feels that Wimsey’s “clothes were a kind of rebuke to the world at large.” Nifty.

The anti-Semitism is cringe-making. I’d forgotten that. But interestingly the villain, who feels that most emotions are merely physical quirks in the brain, seems scientifically prescient. When this was written (1923) that was probably a fringe point of view. But his explanation of Lord Peter’s trench-horror flashbacks seems to resemble some current thinking on neural pathways, while his anti-Freud stance seems to chime with the latest on brain chemistry.  Funny how even mental-health attitudes go in and out of fashion.